Views & Navigation

The three kinds of views

A drawing is ONE model seen through three kinds of views. Nothing is duplicated between them -- the plan, the elevations, and the 3D render all read the same underlying drawing, so a change made in one place shows up everywhere it matters. The view dock at the bottom of the canvas switches between all of them, and the left-side detail menu follows the view: area menu on the plan, elevation menu on an elevation, camera and display controls in 3D.

The plan view is the top-down layout and the place you actually draw. The building outline, the column grid, storage areas, obstructions, doors with their staging and clearance zones, and dimension lines all live here. Each storage area shows its label with live capacity counts, and the rack inside it is drawn in the colors of the elevation it uses -- so the plan doubles as a color-coded map of which configuration is where. The drawing tools (Draw, Add Point, Measure, Select Rack, Door) operate on the plan; the Select tool here edits areas, corners, edges, doors, and dimensions.

Elevation views are the side views -- one view per rack configuration, showing the frame, every beam level, and the loads sitting on them. This is where vertical design happens: adding and reordering levels, beam heights, unit dimensions, clearances, accessories like wire decks, and auto-fill. The Select tool changes meaning here: it selects LEVELS, not areas. An elevation is defined once and referenced by any number of areas back on the plan -- edit the elevation and every area using it re-solves and recounts immediately. That one-to-many link is the core mental model: the plan decides WHERE rack goes, the elevation decides WHAT each bay looks like vertically, and the counts come from the two together.

The 3D view renders the whole warehouse from the same data -- covered in its own topic below. Unlike the other two, it's read-only: a place to look, not to edit.

The 3D view

The dock's cube card opens the 3D render of your warehouse -- building shell, columns, doors, rack with each elevation's real frame and beam colors, and the loads sitting in position. It's a visualization, not an editor: nothing you do in 3D changes the drawing, so it's always safe to hand someone for a look around.

Getting around: the Orbit tool (O) rotates the camera by dragging, Pan (S or middle mouse) slides it, and scroll zooms. The 3D menu offers camera presets -- Iso, Top, Front, Side -- and orbiting freely simply takes over from whatever preset you started at. Display toggles turn the building shell and the pallets and loads on or off, and there's a forklift simulation you can switch on for ambience.

One handy trick: put "[o]" in an area's label and the 3D view renders that area as a solid office block instead of open floor -- "[o1]" forces a one-story office, "[o2]" a two-story, and plain "[o]" picks a sensible height for the building.

Getting around the canvas

Scroll to zoom at your cursor, hold the middle mouse button to pan from any tool, and use the three toolbar buttons -- fit to page, zoom in, zoom out -- when you want a clean reframe. The footer shows your cursor's live position in inches from the drawing origin, useful for sanity-checking where things sit. The Escape key is the universal "get me back to normal": it cancels what the active tool is doing and returns you to Select.